Using personalities popular on social media for promotion may be a hot marketing technique, but it also has a downside, warns one of the world’s biggest advertisers.
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Unilever,
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the maker of Dove shampoo and Hellman’s mayonnaise, is expected to call for greater transparency in the often murky world of influencer marketing during the Cannes ad festival that is taking place this week on the French Riviera.

Influencer marketing, the practice that involves paying people with large social-media followings to promote a product or service, has been growing in importance over the past few years as brands flocked to the practice to help them harness the popularity of social-media platforms.

However, the sector has lost some of its sheen after numerous reports surfaced about fraud that exist in the business from influencers that buy followers to influencers using bots to make it look as if there are more people engaging with their posts.

Points North Group said it has found that midlevel influencers—those with between 50,000 and 100,000 followers—often have about 20% fake followers. The company, which analyzes influencer marketing, estimated that in North America, brands pay influencers millions of dollars each month to reach follower that are fake.

The rise of fraud in the sector has been a wake-up call for marketers who pay influencers based on the number of followers they have.

“At best it’s misleading, at worst it’s corrupt,” Unilever marketing chief Keith Weed said in an interview. “For the sake of a few bad apples in the barrel, I believe there is risk in the area of influencers.”

The consumer-products giant, which spent more than $9 billion on marketing its brands last year, said it wouldn’t work with influencers who buy followers. Unilever said it found some of the influencers it was using were buying followers in some instances.

Mr. Weed also is calling for social-media platforms to do more to fix the issue and wants more measurement and oversight to ensure the problems are eradicated.

“Some platforms already do things in this area, but they have to do it at a larger scale and with more transparency, so the industry can be reassured that the influencers on their platforms are not using these practices,” he said.

Despite the problems, advertisers are still enamored with the marketing technique. A survey of 158 marketers conducted late last year for the Association of National Advertisers found that 75% of those polled use influencer marketing and almost half of them planned to increase their spending on the practice over the next year.

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